Since I’m not out and about anymore, I’ve been trying to pick up the housework slack. Mind you, I’m not crazy about housework in general, but I’m giving it an honest try. I’ve actually been able to load the dishwasher without Vin rearranging it, and can turn it on without needing written instructions.

Vin chops up all the week’s vegetables on Sundays. He always says he’s afraid of me doing it because I’ll cut myself and he doesn’t want to have to take me to the emergency room. (Geesh, need stitches on a sliced finger once and you never live it down!) But I’ve been making the salads and chopping up fruit for quite some time without incident. Well, maybe he’s on to something, because the first Sunday he lets me chop vegetables, I slice into a finger. I guess I’ll just stick to fruit.

And dusting. I really hate dusting, but with all the dog fur, it has to be done. We used to joke about dusting every Thanksgiving holiday, whether the house needed it or not, but I am trying to dust way more often, at least one room every week. This past week I did the dining room, which is where the thermostat is kept. Hmm, didn’t realize that thermostats are so sensitive. Did you know you can change the temperature setting by running a rag over the top of a thermostat? Right, I didn’t know that either. No wonder it was so stinking HOT in the house even though the air conditioner’s been running and this past week’s heat wave ended. Having the heat set to 75 degrees at the same time will do that. Good thing Vin heard the furnace kick on, or we might have had the heat wave longer than the rest of Massachusetts.

Last time I posted about customizing the Vivaldi browser, which the developers claim is simple and one of their objectives, I wondered if I would be able to push my toolbar icons closer together, like they are in Chrome. And the answer is Yes! Although there are a lot of steps, in a nutshell, one simply has to add a “custom.css” file to the application folder and a Vivaldi file. And again and again each time Vivaldi issues an upgrade (once every few months, it seems).

By the way, if you “know” css, then you can certainly investigate a lot more things to customize. However, this example focuses on the space between the icons in the Bookmark Toolbar.

First, create a css file. Simply open some sort of text application (i.e., Notepad or TextPad) and save the file as custom.css (be sure to save it as “All Files” file type or you will end up with “custom.css.txt”) in the location “C:\Users\[your_user_name]\AppData\Local\Vivaldi”.

Paste the following into the new css file:

.bookmark-bar button {
padding:0 1px;
}

I like my icons close together, but you can experiment with making the padding a bit wider than 1 pixel (the default padding width is 6 pixels). Save and close the file, and now you have a backup of your custom stylesheet. Always leave a copy in this location, or you will lose it with each upgrade. That being said, now copythe custom.css file to “C:\Users\[your_user_name]\AppData\Local\Vivaldi\Application\[current_version]\resources\vivaldi\style”.

Navigate up one folder level to “C:\Users\[your_user_name]\AppData\Local\Vivaldi\Application\[current_version]\resources\vivaldi\” and open the file “browser.html”. Don’t just double-click on it, however, or you will end up viewing it in your browser! Instead, right-click and choose to open (or edit) it with the same text application you used to create your css file. Alternatively, you could select to open this file from the text application, navigating to the same location.